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By Sherwood

Many of the challenges that I encountered while working on my final project have involved reconciling historical ambiguities with a platform that demands precision. Google Maps was built by computer scientists and expert cartographers. Conversely, Neatline was built by humanists, who regularly encounter unreliable data when working with primary sources. Something else that appeals to me about Neatline is its emphasis on narrative. The user interface affords historians the opportunity to contextualize their map with written information. In my application, this section could the display primary sources that I used to derive railroad routes. A visualization like “Journalism’s Journey West” or “Geography of the Post,” which Alec critiqued in his post, could really benefit from Neatline’s user interface, which is both aesthetically appealing and fully functional. Conversely, the user interface in both “Journalism’s Journey West” and “Geography of the Post” detracts from the educational experience by being overly complex and unintuitive.

Unfortunately, getting Neatline up and running requires a significant amount of preconfiguration. Most importantly, you need to have Omeka running, since Neatline is an Omeka plugin. I only got as far as installing the LAMP stack that Omeka runs on, a software architecture model that uses the Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP programming language. Afterwards, I downloaded the Omeka source files and placed them in my Apache server. When I initiated the local server, I was able to view the Omeka page. Unfortunately, it showed an error without any error log, so I wasn’t able to continue.

There are tools out there that make web development insanely easy and accessible to non-developers. For example, there’s WordPress, Heroku and GoDaddy. However, Neatline and Omeka are not among them. My main criticism of these tools is that no historian could realistically use them on his own, without undergoing considerable training beforehand. As a result, Omeka doesn’t quite bridge the gap between humanities and the internet, and Neatline doesn’t exactly make graphical history easy, like Nowviskie claims it does. There’s still a considerable learning curve associated with both technologies.

I would be impressed if any of my classmates were able to effectively use either in their final project. Personally, I have found it easier to build an application from scratch.